Hey there people, this is my first post to slug! I am in need of some help and I was wondering if you guys could lend a hand/brain. Thanks for taking the time to read!
Ok, here's the situation: 2 HDDs currently on my PC Harddisk0 60gb drive Partitioned into 2 drives - 10gb (C - XP installed on here), 50gb (D) with everything else windows on it Harddisk1 20gb drive Partitioned into 2 drives - 8gb (Debian installed here), 500mb (swap space), 10gb unallocated I'm running low on space, so I just bought a 120gb drive to replace the 20gb drive. But there's a problem in installing it - when I had Debian installed (note: I did not install it myself, I had a friend help me out), I installed LILO as the boot selector. But now when I disconnect Harddisk1 (with Debian on it) XP won't boot up on it's own (I understand to some degree this has to do with the MBR of Harddisk0 ? Is this correct?) So I followed some advice (friends and online) and tried using the Recovery Console by booting up with the XP CD, and then running 'fixmbr', whilst Harddisk1 had been unplugged. It "cautioned" me about the possible loss of partition data, and I went ahead anyway. It said fixmbr was successful, but upon restart it gave me a 'Disk Read Error, Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart'. I also noticed at this time that my 'D' partition was still present, but it was of "Unknown" status (rather than NTFS - which worried me!) So then I tried also running 'fixboot' (still with Harddisk1 unplugged), and still no luck. I then tried plugging Harddisk1 back in, and all of a sudden XP loads fine straight away (C and D drives are visible, but now LILO is gone, which I don't really care about). So I tried again at the Recovery Console to run 'fixmbr'; again it said it was successful, so I removed Harddisk1 and it gave me the same error again. I've tried using Partition Magic to help me out but it seems useless at this point. One thing I did notice however, was that in Partition Magic the status of Harddisk0\Partition1 was Active, but so was Harddisk1\Partition1 (the linux partition). I know that if I wanted to dual boot both would have to be active, but if I want to get rid of the linux partition, should this not be active? I couldn't find a way in Partition Magic to 'deactivate' it, so I left it at that. I *could* reinstall XP on my new hard drive and then copy over everything and install all of my programs again, but i'm obviously trying to avoid that scenario until the last minute because it would be quite a task to do so... Any help out there? It will be greatly appreciated! Cheers, - Tokes -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
